MEMOIRES AFFECTIVES (ALLIANCE/VIVA FILM, 2004)

By Rick Jackson

Directed by Francis Leclerc, Memoires Affectives is a highly charged drama about a veterinarian named Alexander Tourneur who wakes up from a coma only to find he cannot remember anything about his life, including relatives, his business partner and girlfriends.

The screenplay by Leclerc and Marcel Beaulieu focuses on Alexander's plight and his return to some kind of normalcy in what may be a second chance at life, thanks to an accident which almost killed him if it weren't for a stranger who took him to the hospital.

Roy Dupuis, whose screen credits include Jesus of Montreal, Seraphin: Heart of Stone, and The Barbarian Invasions, brings to the screen one of the most convincing portraits of a man determined to live a normal life. As he questions his ex-wife, daughter, business partner and others, he finds them creating memories that aren't true.

Alexander becomes an enigmatic character thanks to Leclerc and Beaulieu who strike a balance between reality and fiction by letting you sort out the truth by leaving out the preordained happy ending from your average Hollywood drama. By gaining your sympathy as he wakes up, they depend on your personal feelings toward Alexander to keep you watching and it works.

Dupuis gives him an inner strength that makes him real enough to be believable, and there are times you sense what might happen next but each time it is a turn only he can make for essentially it is his thoughts and feelings guiding the story as if some otherworldly imaginative force, mysterious and unseen, is controlling him.

From here Alexander learns something he never realized before the accident. This is the truth behind a family tragedy which he faces with his estranged brother in Toronto. It is one of the most emotional and heart-wrenching scenes in the entire film, with it's brutally honest images transcending the imaginaton long enough to be real, for not only Alexander but for us, too.

The music score captures the mood effectively throughout as it underscores the inescapable fear of the unknown as Alexander faces the world from the perspective of a man hurt deep inside and not able to deal with his demons until after his life changing accident.

The cinematography captures the mood perfectly, especially at the very beginning when you see him alone in bed. The isolation is symbolic of the kind of life he had, driven to work by day as a veterinarian, and by night by the bottle as an escape from reality. Each scene thereafter - when he looks at family pictures and drinks alone - he is haunted by the partial memories which come back but make no sense because he never really understood them. The mood in low lighting each time brings home the continued abyss of solitude which still is with him, even at the end when he discovers the truth about his father's death.

No other film at this year's Kingston Canadian Film Festival strikes a sense of desperation and truth through the eyes of personal tragedy from one man. It is almost Bergmanesque in that it examines the heart and soul of a man's suffering.

Only through searching through his past is he able to, at least, have the chance to redeem himself and hope for a decent future, and it is here where the film ends. The last shot of his face hurt and dishevelled by a pain far more greater than the accident that took his memory shows he is on the way to recovery but still a long way to go.

March 7, 2005

Copyright 2005 Rick Jackson